SOURCE: "Andre Dubus: From Detached Incident to Compressed Novel," in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, Vol. XXVIII, No. 1, Fall, 1986, pp. 19-27.

In the following critical assessment of Dubus's short stories published between 1977 to 1985, Yarbrough asserts that Dubus's fiction-writing talents are best showcased in his longer short stories.

Andre Dubus has published two novels and four novellas, but his growing reputation rests most securely on his short stories. Those stories may, with some qualifications, be divided into three groups, based upon the way in which the stories are structured: closely related to structure, characterization is handled differently in each of the three types of stories.

In the first of these groups, the stories limit themselves to what Henry James called "the detached incident." Narration is straightforward. We begin at one point in time and move ahead until the incident that gives the story its life has finished taking place...